Calling Fireflies Who Cannot See

Perhaps what we say is not today, but tomorrow
Read the book you will be writing, strange worlds unfurl
Anticipation becomes more than a one way street

The future’s a sight to see
Are you there with me?

Initial actions
Pre-umbral attractions
Pieces of the puzzle before the picture is pleased

The future’s a furious fight in me
Are you Locke or key?

A new dimension came years ago
Now our reflections our reflections show
We broke the ice on a shifting sea

The future’s a label maker stuck on E
Are you mouse molesting bourgeoisie?

Buzzing flowers in the field
A cross-pollinating swirl
Genuflect before the savior bee

The future’s a connective tree
Swing together singing shall we?

Machines smaller than the glazing of an eye
Sweetly wait to service you and I
Miracles will become convenient necessity

The future’s a sight to be
Are you there and free?

Some days we’ll live and thrive
Some days we’ll sigh and die
Just another Jesus complex simple in the sky

The future’s a dark marquee
Calling fireflies who cannot see

Good Golly!

Jebus! Even American FISH are obese!

In a photo from Tim Pruitt and provided by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Tim Pruitt, of Alton, Ill., holds a 124-pound blue catfish early Sunday morning, May 22, 2005, that he hooked late Saturday on the Mississippi River near Alton. The fish is 58 inches long and 44 inches around. It took Pruitt more than a half-hour to drag the fish into his boat. It is the largest of its kind in state history, and is expected to be certified a world record by the International Game Fish Association. The fish has been kept alive and will be on display in a tank at the Cabela's Outfitter store in Kansas City, Kan., according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. (AP Photo/Handout photo provided by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050525/ap_on_fe_st/big_fish

Fact? Fiction?...eh, F it... It's Fun!

Major UFO Breakthrough in Brazil 22-May-2005

The nation of Brazil is relaxing its policy of UFO secrecy. It is the first among a number of countries known to be considering the idea of abandoning the secrecy mandate that has been in place worldwide since the phenomenon first began to be publicly known nearly fifty years ago.

A.J. Gevaerd of the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers reports that a number of important files have just been released, including a folder containing documents from 1977 that cover dozens of cases of UFOs in the Amazon with over 100 pictures made during Operation Saucer, an official Brazilian military investigation that was carried out between September and December, 1977.

This change in policy means that one of the countries with the most extensive amount of UFO activity is now going to share its previously secret knowledge with the public.



A. J. Gevaerd writes:

Friday, May 20, was a historic day for Ufology in Brazil and in the world as the Brazilian Air Force (FAB), for the very first time in its history, officially receives a committee of top UFO researchers to openly discuss sightings in the country and fully exam classified UFO documents in several military facilities in Brasilia, the Federal Capital.

By doing this very important step, Brazilian Air Force (FAB) has placed Brazil in a very short list of countries whose militaries acknowledge the Ufology as a serious activity and significative effort to fully understand the nature and origin of UFOs. “We want to have all info on the subject, that is withheld by us for some decades, fully released to public, through the UFO community”, declared brigadier Telles Ribeiro, chief of Brazilian Air Force Communication Center.

The Brazilian Government, through the Brazilian Air Force, has finally decided to come forward and recognize the UFO research as a genuine activity as a direct result of the intense pressure made by the campaign UFOs: Freedom of Information Now, a movement started by the Brazilian UFO Magazine in April 2004. The campaign was launched by the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers (CBU), composed of 6 UFO civilian researchers: Claudeir Covo, Marco Petit, Rafael Cury, Reginaldo de Athayde, Fernando Ramalho and A. J. Gevaerd (Athayde was sick an replaced by new interim member veteran UFO researcher Roberto Affonso Back)

Details of the campaign both in Portuguese and in English can be consulted at: Ufo.com.br and UFO.com.br/secrecy.

The approach of the Brazilian military by the CBU committee started last February, ten months after the campaign begun, with a phone call from a Brazilian Air Force spokesman, major Antonio Lorenzo, and a formal invitation to a visit and a chat in some Air Force headquarters in Brasilia. Major Lorenzo fully recognized the UFO researchers’ efforts in this field and provided a few details of what kind of reserved files and procedures the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) has about the UFO Phenomena and its detection, recording and investigation in the country.

Two meeting between the civilian UFO researchers and the military took place last Friday, May 20, and firstly happened in the headquarters of the Integrated Center of Air Defense and Air Traffic Control (Centro Integrado de Defesa Aérea e Controle de Trafego Aéreo, Cindacta), a very sensitive facility. During two hours, the researchers were given lectures of the procedures conducted at Cindacta and had the chance to visit air traffic control rooms and understand how UFOs could be detected by the Air Force personnel.

The second and most important meeting took place just after this one at the very reserved facilities of Brazilian Air Defense Command (Comando de Defesa Aerea Brasileiro, Comdabra), an even more sensitive installation that controls the entire air defense situation in the country and surrounding areas of Atlantic Ocean and South America. In this facility the UFO researchers were given full briefing of the top aspects of aerial defense of the country.

It was in this facility that its own commander, brigadier Atheneu Azambuja, admitted to the UFO researchers how concerned the Brazilian military are about the UFO phenomena. Azambuja also gave details of Comdabra procedures and openly admitted that the country has systematically detected and registered UFOs in the country – labeled as “H Traffic” – since 1954. That wasn’t a surprise for the UFO researchers of the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers (CBU), but how this registering process took place was.

After detailed explanations of Comdabra activities, brigadier Atheneu Azambuja, for the first time in history, gave full access to the civilian UFO researchers to exam 3 different folders with classified UFO information, cases from specific dates of 1954, 1977 and 1986. The first case was an airplane pursuit of a UFO in the ocean shores of Paraná State.

The second file was much more important. In the folder containing the 1977 docs that could be examined by the UFO researchers were dozens of cases of UFOs in the Amazon with and amazing amount of over 100 pictures made during the so-called Operation Saucer, an official program of UFO investigation by the military that took place from September to December, 1977, and has been fully covered by specialized UFO press over the world.

The third case was the “The Official Night of UFOs in Brazil”, a very significative group of events that happened in May 1986, when 21 objects of over 100 m in diameter jammed Brazilian air traffic control system over Rio de Janeiro, Sao Jose dos Campos and Sao Paulo, mainly, and several jets were sent to intercept – without any success – the intruders.

The Brazilian Air Force (FAB) representatives at those meetings then fully admitted that Ufology is serious business and broadly recognized the activity of UFO research by the civilian UFO community. And also guaranteed that further steps are about to be taken to let the researchers to exam the entire military UFO files in a more comprehensive way. Plus, a committee of military and civilian UFO researchers was promised to start operating very soon, coordinated by the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers (CBU). This certainly means that we will start a new era in Ufology in Brazil and in South America. Very good things are about to happen as the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) command, the Brazilian Ministry of Defense and the Brazilian president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva receive the open letters and formal requests for opening for good the documents and start the mentioned committee, as presented to them by their spokesman.

--heard about this on Coast2Coast, and borrowed story text from www.unknowncountry.com.


As usual, draw your own conclusions... I have yet to draw mine.

But everything changes: policies, conclusions, reality... flux flux flux!

"There's one near your toes."

New Way To Monitor Your Impending Demise

http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/step/


I wonder if the whole thing will turn red right before California breaks off into the ocean.

Which, really, wouldn't change my daily routine too much.

For, as a wise man once said,

"The further from Colorado, the closer to Hell."


End of Line.

News, Nose And Recommendation

News:
The Phoenix Lights have been captured again, in damn good detail this time.
Grumble, laugh or wink if you will... but the day is coming for Mankind when the nights will outshine the sun.

"UFO hunter Jeff Willes (UfosOverPhoenix.com), captured a new video of the "Phoenix Lights" while investigating reports of sightings near northwest Phoenix. According to Willes, at 7:30PM on May 12, seven lights came out of nowhere, traveling in a north to south direction. Willes later contacted Luke Air Force Base about the lights, but they claimed to have no knowledge of the event."



Go download the short video here:
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page945.html?theme=light



Nose: (as in, this fucking stinks)
"Newsweek backs off report alleging desecration of holy book"
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/16/newsweek.quran/



Basically, Newsweek went to press with a story before editing out the hearsay, falsehoods, etc. And the result was people died, property destroyed, and tender Afgani-US relations hurt. I do try to stay away from politics in this rubber-lined blog... and I'm not trying to take either side publicly now. But God damn it, edit your publications for truth lest there are international casualties... words have power, so leave the ineffectual bullshit no one will ever read to blogs like this one. (rant done)



Recommendation: (from our down-under friend, Crocodile Balls)


"if you only buy one album this year (or perhaps it's too late).
atom and his package (band name)
1 guy. like starlings, only really funny.
a society of people named elihu (album name)
best shit ever. at least give it a listen.
i will be sad if i am the only person who ever hear this."

http://www.atomandhispackage.com/index2.html

thanks for the tip, Croc-B
after work, I'll head to Twist&Shout (best independent music store in Denver)


end of line

Turn It The F Off

reprinted here with assumed permission.
(don't you just love assumed persmission!?)

IT IS not enough to have just one figure on the new food pyramid telling us we need to exercise. You need two.

Before you can even think about that person going up the stairs you first have to have a figure at the base of the pyramid. That figure would stand over a waste basket. That figure would throw an object into the basket.

The object would be a television.

That would be a new tea party. Few Americans, myself included, are about to actually do that. My wife wants to kill the TV, but I keep it for OJ car chases, Iraq invasions, and my seasonal affective DirecTV disorder for Green Bay Packer football games.

So if we are not ready for a full revolution of the wastebasket, we could at least have an insurgency. The figure at the base could rise from a couch, point a clicker at a blank TV that says ''off for an hour more." The operative word is ''off." We cannot get on the stairs until we get off the couch and turn off the TV.

Television is the occupying force standing in the way of physical liberation. The government's American Time Use Survey says that after sleeping our eight or so hours and working our eight or so hours, the next single biggest activity is watching two and a half hours of television. Participating in sports, exercise, and recreation adds up to only 30 minutes.

As an interesting aside, it is quite revealing that for all of our current debates over moral values, no activities we associate with ''moral values" -- caring for children over 6, religious pursuits, community volunteering, and reading to children -- come close to the time we spend watching television.

Television has so colonized the nation that the government barely recognizes it as a major impediment to health. When the government announced a few months ago that Americans needed 60 to 90 minutes of exercise to control or lose weight, newspapers and television shows were full of incredulous people and commentators who said such proclamations were ridiculous because the average person did not have the time. It did not occur to any of these incredulous people to turn the TV off.

It is as if the outcry intimidated the government into a silent retreat. The Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services dutifully mention in their dietary guidelines that 38 percent of high school students watch three or more hours of television a day. But nowhere in their ''key recommendations" do they suggest that we should turn the television off. A suggestion to limit ''sedentary behaviors" like television watching is buried in the discussion section.

The MyPyramid.gov website that lets people customize the new pyramid to their lifestyle suggests families should ride bikes together and that people should join neighborhood walking groups. The government explicitly urges people to ''walk, skate, or cycle more and drive less." But nowhere does the government explicitly suggest minimizing television. The only reference to television is, ''Do stretches, exercises, or pedal a stationary bike while watching television."
In their press conference to unveil the pyramid, food and nutrition undersecretary Eric Bost rattled off the dire national statistics of obesity and diabetes. ''If we don't change these trends," Bost said, ''our children may be the first generation that cannot look forward to a longer life span than their parents, something that should be very troubling to all of us."

The shortened lifespans were not so troubling as to tell Americans to turn off the television. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns came to the podium to talk about his diet and how he gets up each day with his wife and exercises for 20 minutes. He said nothing about television. Denise Austin of the President's Council on Physical Fitness came to the podium and talked about getting up before the kids and doing her 30 minutes of exercise.

''Now for all of you who say, 'Oh, 30 minutes, how am I going to squeeze it in?' " Austin asked rhetorically. She suggested that people who feel pressed for time can break up their exercise into 10-minute chunks. She said nothing about television. No one at the unveiling of the pyramid said anything in their prepared remarks about the 60 to 90 minutes it takes to control and lose weight.

If Americans cut their TV time in half, they would have that time. The musical-poet Gil Scott-Heron once said the revolution will not be televised. The revolution against obesity begins by overthrowing the tyranny of television.
By Derrick Z. Jackson May 6, 2005
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/
editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/05/06/getting_exercised_over_tv/

(summary in brief: get off ass, move ass around, appreciate ass more)

It Is Beginning

(don't you just love ominous titles!)

For whatever reasons, debatable, passionate or faithful, we are witnessing a changing weather, a changing planet.



"A Cambridge University scientist has detected the first real signs of a slow down in the warm Atlantic current known as the Gulf Stream. Such a development could lead to temperatures plunging in some European countries as the Stream, which originates in the Gulf of Mexico and follows the eastern coastlines of the US and Canada, then bends towards north-western Europe. The UK and Ireland are especially vulnerable to changes in the current, where it maintains average temperatures at 5ºC to 8ºC higher than they would otherwise be."
http://www.euobserver.com/?sid=9&aid=19019

And hey, that's cool (or COLD, based on what movie or scientific report you've perused lately... they're practically interchangeable, per over the course of time science turns into bullshit, and bullshit into science).

Drastic changes in Earth's climate (rise and fall of the ice ages) is Mankind's bread and butter. At least it was before we all got hooked on bread and butter (AGRICULTURE).

Our propensity to migrate across continents (north and south in search of warmer or cooler climes as need be) and our super adaption machines (cerebral cortex) have served us well on this fecund, but occasionally catastrophic, planet. The changes around us serve to cause changes within us, as environment and evolution often thus dance. We brief, organism encased entities have been shaped by climatic discontinuity just as all Life has. Frankly, I get bored if things aren't breaking. Suburbia, and everything it entails, is worse than death.

So boil on, dear frog (--read some Daniel Quinn).

At this point, I still don't know if we're the frog or the warming water in which it sits. But the powers that be have already stopped distributing Australia's Sheaf Stout (best in the god damned world) in Colorado. So I've pretty much given up on everything else.

Convention Update

"Update: The convention was a mixed success. Unfortunately, we had no confirmed time travelers visit us.We did, however, have a great series of lectures, awesome bands, and even a DeLorean. We regret having had to turn away visitors, but there were capacity restrictions governing Morss Hall."

The Time Traveler Convention (THIS IS NOT A DRILL!)

The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)(event starts at 8:00pm)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

What is it?

Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in one week, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!

Why do you need my help?

We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

Great idea, I'd love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

Can't the Can't the time travelers just hear about it from the attendees, and travel back in time to attend?

Yes, they can! In fact, we think this will happen, and the small number of adventurous time travelers who do attend will go back to their "home times" and tell all their friends to come, causing the convention to become a Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever.

Unfortunately, we of the present (2005) don't have time travel, and so we only have one chance at observing the convention. If the time travelers don't leave us their secrets, we won't be able to go back in time and see our convention in all its glory unless it is publicized in advance.

Isn't time travel impossible?

We can't know for certain. The ancient Greeks would have thought computers were impossible, and the Phoenicians certainly wouldn't have believed that humans would one day send a spacecraft to the moon and back. We cannot predict the future of science or technology, so we can only make an effort and see if any time travelers come to our convention. If you would like to read more about time travel, check out our reading list.

I'm from the future, and I'd like to attend!

We're not sure how you're emailing us from the future, but we'd love to have you! Come as you are! No dress code whatsoever. We do request that you bring some sort of proof that you do indeed come from the future, and haven't just dressed like you do. We welcome any sort of proof, but things like a cure for AIDS or cancer, a solution for global poverty, or a cold fusion reactor would be particularly convincing as well as greatly appreciated.

I'm from the present, and I'd like to attend!

Revised 4/26/05: Due
to an overwhelming email response, it does not appear that we will be
able to accomodate any more visitors from the present, especially given
the unpredictable number of attendees from the future. Thanks for your
interest. -->

Great! We would also love to have you, especially if you have helped publicize. We request that you bring refreshments if possible, as we need to make this a great party for you and for the time travelers. RSVP at timetravelerconvention@gmail.com, and then show up at the designated place at the designated time! The East Campus Courtyard is in between the two red rectangles on this map. If you plan on attending, PLEASE check this page frequently for updates. UPDATE 5/2: Convention events start at 8pm now. Feel free to come at either 8pm, 10pm, or anytime in between. We'd recommend coming early as we hope to get some very interesting speakers and musicians for this time.

I'm from the present, and I'd like to attend, but I can't!

No worries! If time travel is invented in your lifetime, you can always come later. Even if it isn't, we'll have pictures and video up at this site within a week after the Convention.

I've volunteered and helped publicize!

Thanks! If you'd like to be included in the gallery, please send us a picture of your publicity effort by email at timetravelerconvention@gmail.com. You can also email us with any other questions you might have.

This is neat!
http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/

There's All Kinds Of Traps

Different prey
Different traps
Careful you don't get caught